Pachter’s conscious exploration of the visual symbolism that surrounded him began, long before the ascendancy of Andy Warhol, when as a teenager he painted the landscape from a two-dollar bill on his bedroom wall, much to the bewilderment of his mother. It was reinforced by the early work of Marshall McLuhan, who had published his classic examination of symbolism in visual advertising, The Mechanical Bride, by the time Pachter had reached university. This book was withdrawn from circulation at the insistence of several companies whose ads McLuhan had reproduced in it, but you could buy copies of it direct from the maestro, who kept them in his cellar. I had one, and showed it to Pachter at the time. He had a natural curiosity about advertising, which a number of us shared — we were, after all, bombarded with it from morning to night — but McLuhan helped us to look at it in a more speculative way. For Pachter the results of this influence were specific, as in his lithograph of a woman’s love affair with her hot-water heater, but also more general. Throughout his career he has shown a receptiveness and a sensitivity to visual images of all sorts, whether they originate in the world of art or on a streetside hoarding. His subway mural of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens (Hockey Knights in Canada) and his Acme Bar and Grill mural (Voice of Culture) are the latest products of this visual cross-pollination.
My own collaboration with Charles Pachter developed slowly and without premeditation. By 1960, when I was in my third year at university, Pachter had entered the same university, in Art and Archeology. We had just spent another summer at Camp White Pine — a summer which, as I recall, we ended by hiding under the cabin floors of some visiting city slickers and howling like wolverines — and we continued to see one another. I had at that time a small silkscreen poster business, and it was this equipment that eventually ended up in Pachter’s hands some time after I graduated, and with which he produced an early set of serigraphs. We continued to correspond through these years, while he was in Paris and Toronto and later at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, while I was at Harvard or teaching at the University of British Columbia.
The Circle Game, his first limited-edition folio, illustrated a group of poems I had just completed, and which I’d sent to him rather casually in a letter, after he’d written saying he’d like to take a crack at illustrating something. We were both so excited by their results that we went on to do several other collaborations, including his astonishing Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein and eventually, the monumental Journals of Susanna Moodie. Pachter was eccentric among artists of his generation, for whom a studied non-literacy was the social norm, in that he permitted himself a lively verbal dimension and allowed his imagination to be accessible to verbal imagery. His procedure when he created a book, using either my poems or those of somebody else such as Alden Nowlan, John Newlove, or Dennis Lee, was to immerse himself in the texture of the poetry itself for weeks, exploring its possible meanings and directions and leaving himself open to its suggestions, before starting to create his visual images. What he was able to produce was neither simple-minded illustration nor a juxtaposition of words and unrelated visual work, but an interaction between text and image that is unusual in the field.
Since that time, in a career which has now lasted three decades, Pachter has continued vigorously to explore his several media, to diversify his imagery, and to structure and restructure his visual world. In doing so he has restructured the world around him, and has changed profoundly the way we look at our own familiar iconography, even our own banalities. His output has been immense, his wit and versatility have remained constant, and his range continues to broaden. His is a sophisticated art which draws upon many techniques and evokes many echoes, yet it remains strongly individual, and firmly rooted in a ground which Pachter has both excavated and cultivated himself.
Margaret Atwood
Best-selling author of The Edible Woman,
The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake
Introduction
“What is the point of reading biographies of artists?” asked Deborah Solomon in her New York Times review (December 2, 2015) of Julian Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art. Coral Ann Howells, in The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, remarks that “biography is the making of pâté from the duck.” Is it possible for an entire life to be contained within a book of a couple hundred pages? How does one write someone’s biography when they’re not even dead yet? Solomon suggests that “the details of a life are helpless to explain the majesty of art.”
So the question remains: Should we try to separate the artist from the art?
What matters, Solomon contends, “are not the despairing childhoods and difficult relationships” — whether a particular artist was altruistic like Cézanne, or plainly cruel like Picasso, or publicity-seeking like Warhol — but “the object that emerged in the end, an object unburdened by life, succeeding or failing on the basis of its appeal to the eye.” Yet, she also admits that “biographies of artists offer us a chance to view a life from all sides, to be moved not only by triumphant masterworks but by the stirring efforts underlying even the supposed duds.”
Jacques Barzun, in his book The Modern Researcher, tells us that “biography gives us vicarious experience.” Whether you admire or revile their subjects, biographies can inspire us, encourage us to dream, and, at minimum, let us see how others handled the trials and tribulations of life.
Meanwhile, in Michel Foucault and Theology, a book by James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette, Foucault is quoted as saying, “We need biography as we need history, in order to dispel the chimeras of the origin. We use biography for its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats.” It is usually argued that the point of a work of art is not to learn about the artist but to have an aesthetic experience, regardless of the artist’s intentions. However, information from an artist’s life can sometimes help us understand the meaning of their art.
Charles Pachter emerged as an artist in a country that was previously inhibited by colonial insecurities, a country that gradually grew into a new era of nationalistic pride and confidence. The Canada in which Pachter has worked all of his life is one that, save for a few exceptions, does not celebrate its living artists. It is also a country with a tight and exclusive arts bureaucracy, one that offers little room for or support of artists that don’t play by its rules. Despite this, Pachter has consistently created works that communicate joy and passion, along with humour and a great pride in Canada. It is a body of work of immense achievement.
When we look at his art, though, few bother to appreciate the articulate genius behind his wisecracking facade, or to think about the psychological burden he has had to endure from years of rejection by government granting institutions, curators, art critics, and members of the art establishment. The works succeed or fail by themselves, of course, but knowing the context in which they were created lends greater resonance to them.
Charles’s struggles to survive and thrive as an artist are ones that he shares with other artists, too. The fracturing of relationships and the forfeiture of any semblance of normal life are common occurrences for many artists. Few readers ponder their sacrifices — the sleepless nights; the years spent alone, painting when depressed, when elated; the self-promoting; the need to be constantly socializing, networking, trying to sell.
Of course, Charles is by no means the only successful self-promoter in the art world. Gustave Courbet was a great painter, but he was also a serious publicity seeker. So was Salvador Dali, and so is Jeff Koons. Andy Warhol was another big self-promoter; he felt that being good in business was the most fascinating kind of art, and that making money is art and good business acumen is the best art.
After decades without any official recognition or support, Pachter began to finally receive acknowledgement for his achievements in the 1990s. One of the highlights of his life was the year he received an honorary doctorate from Brock University in 1996.
The media release stated, “In the 1960s he completed his undergraduate education in Toronto, where his parents hoped he would pass on being an artist and become a doctor.”